Dick Cheney Makes a Great Case for Prosecuting Torturers

In an interview on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, former Vice President Dick Cheney basically taunted ambitious lawyers at the Hague to come after him.

The host of the show, Chuck Todd, read details from the Senate report on “enhanced interrogation” and asked Mr. Cheney if he thought they amounted to torture. Rectal feeding? Keeping a man in a coffin-sized box? Handcuffing another man’s wrists to an overhead bar for 22 hours per day, for two consecutive days?

No. Mr. Cheney would only apply the label “torture” to the 9/11 attacks. What Americans did after the attacks was not torture for one of three reasons.

1. Because the Justice Department sanctioned the technique: “All the techniques that were authorized by the president were, in effect, blessed by the Justice Department opinion that we could go forward with those without, in fact, committing torture.”

2. Because it was not officially part of the interrogation program: “That was not something that was done as part of the interrogation program…It wasn’t torture in terms of it wasn’t part of the program.”

3. Because it wasn’t as bad as 9/11: “With respect to trying to define that as torture I come back to the proposition torture was what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11. There’s no comparison between that and what we did with inspect-enhanced interrogation.”

Mr. Cheney was bullishly nonsensical — refusing to acknowledge a difference between mass murder and torture. Worse, he was unrepentant.

Did any of the details from the report “plant any seed of doubt?” asked Mr. Todd. “Absolutely not,” Mr. Cheney answered.

What about the fact that “25 percent of the detainees” turned out to be innocent?

“I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective” answered Mr. Cheney, meaning “to get the guys who did 9/11.” For the record, Mr. Cheney did not “get the guys” — at least not the main guy. His successors did. And despite the narrative spun by “Zero Dark Thirty,” it looks as though torture did not contribute meaningfully to tracking down Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Cheney added: “I’d do it again in a minute.”

President Obama said in 2009 that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” He stressed that “what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.” So he issued an executive order banning torture, but declined to prosecute the people who had endorsed or committed torture.

Because of that decision, Mr. Cheney is among those looking forward—to a time when, under a different administration, it might be possible to “do it again.”